Community Spotlight: We Plan out the Kitchen Garden
For some reason, community garden projects always strike a chord with me. Perhaps it’s the combination of meeting new people, gushing about our plant catastrophes and triumphs, and learning in a low-pressure environment about how to grow our own that makes volunteering at such places so attractive.

One of my

The warm community feeling I get often comes from participating in the valuable monthly and weekly workshops. Today’s workshop theme “The Kitchen Garden” meant that we focused on planning the vegetables and flowers to be grown this year. January is a great time to reflect on the previous year’s successes and

Some good crops to start propagating now are
One of the volunteers had been propagating pak choi on a commercial scale. There were seed trays of this Chinese green at different weeks of growth, all perfectly spaced out and healthy! Definitely, one for my wish list.

Propagation can be done in a greenhouse for those lucky enough to have the space or even inside on a windowsill. The idea is to keep the seed trays at a constantly warm temperature, around 25 degrees Celsius, and provide supplemental light in the short winter days with an extra lamp. This should help a lot of the seeds germinate early.
Other than seed trays, seed modules also work well for propagating and make the job of transplanting into the ground easier. Firstly, you don’t have to pot on into a larger container, as you would from a seed tray. And secondly, you can release the mature seedling easily from its module by squeezing the bottom.

After a tour of the vegetable garden and a friendly cuppa tea in the small volunteer kitchen, we set off to work in the edible garden. There
My

I really enjoyed my time and met a few fellow allotment owners who are way more experienced than me. They seemed to agree that I was crazy for getting a 250m² allotment a 40-minute drive away. “Overly ambitious”? Perhaps. We shall see!
